TUPPER LAKE - Friday night at 5 p.m., for the first time in 42 years, members of the Tupper Lake Police Department will not be answering the phone at their station.

Instead, a voice recording will answer it, telling emergency callers to call 911.

The change is part of the department's switch to overnight dispatch on weekends through Franklin County's 911 service, which will run from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The change has been in the works for a year and is only a six-month trial period at this point, but if all goes well, it may be extended. It is expected to save the village about $30,000 and free up officers to patrol or conduct investigations on those weekend evenings rather than wait around the station for calls.

"The whole idea of this program is to put boots on the ground," village police Chief Tom Fee said.

Fee said that by about 1 p.m. Wednesday he had completed setting up the phone system that will pick up when people call during those times.

"Supposedly, it is as user-friendly as we can possibly make it," Fee said.

When someone calls the station at its 359-3776 number, the auto-attendant who answers will first tell the caller to hang up and dial 911 if she or he is calling with a police, fire or medical emergency.

While the line will redirect calls for other purposes, people will be told to hang up and call 911 directly because it will allow the enhanced-911 system in Malone to gather information about the caller.

After that, the recording will tell the caller that if it's not an emergency, he or she can dial an extension or listen for the options.

The first option will be to reach a contact for after-hours water and sewer problems, which will connect the caller to a private contractor.

The next option will tell the caller to press 3 for an emergency involving the village Municipal Electric Department, the village Department of Public Works or the town Highway Department, which will transfer the call to another private vendor that will connect the caller to someone who can help him or her.

The recorded voice will tell callers to press 4 to leave a message for the chief, which Fee said happens a lot on the weekends. He said he usually racks up five or six voicemails each weekend.

The auto-attendant will then tell the caller to press zero for any other questions or concerns. The caller will be sent to the 911 center in Malone, but it won't register in the enhanced system, which means callers will need to explain where they are calling from as they speak with dispatchers.

Sometimes another option will be set up if there's an emergency or public information that needs to be disseminated. For example, if there is a power outage, a person could call and press 5, and they would be sent to a message giving the latest update on the outage. Fee said the department often gets calls like that, and a message would free up the phone lines for other potential calls.

When someone calls 911, dispatchers in Malone who have been thoroughly trained will answer the call and have the person answer a list of questions that will come up on their computer screens. If the issue is a police emergency, dispatchers will then contact TLPD patrol cars through several outlets, including e-mail, radio and phone, with the information.

Many backups have been built into the system to ensure that patrolmen and Malone 911 dispatchers are able to contact one another under any circumstance, Fee said. Malone will also be checking in every hour even if nothing is going on, so if patrolmen don't hear from dispatchers once an hour, they will know there is a problem.

This weekend, Fee plans to have his officers manning both the Tupper Lake station and the Malone dispatching center in case anything goes wrong. He also has a dispatcher scheduled to be in the station even during 911 hours through the rest of February as a safeguard.

But in March, Fee plans to shut down the station during those 30 hours on the weekend. It will be the first time the station hasn't had a person in it for 42 years.

Fee said there is no doubt in his mind that there will be problems with the new system, but he is anxious to start testing it after all the planning he and his staff have been doing.

"We've tried to build in everything we could," Fee said. "We're going to have to get into the real world and see. ... We're going to find out what's going to happen, and I expect that things are going to go wrong and things are going to go right."

Fee said he wants as much feedback from the public as possible.

"There's no way that we can correct (a problem) unless somebody tells us," Fee said.

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Contact Jessica Collier at 891-2600 ext. 25 or jcollier@adirondackdailyenterprise.com.